Trench Patterns: 'Fragments' finally come together (with video)

Pat Donnelly, GAZETTE THEATRE CRITIC10.24.2012

Alyson Grant says Trench Patterns was inspired partly by soldiers executed for desertion during the First World War. “I started digging into that (the executions) because it seemed to be an interesting piece of little known history.”

MONTREAL - Alyson Grant sees next week’s premiere of her first play, Trench Patterns, as proof of her perseverance. Up until she finished it, Grant’s creative writing of the theatrical kind was sporadic. Her main focus was her day job as Chair of the English Department at Dawson College — a position she has held for two years.

“My only goal was to complete something, ” Grant admitted in a recent between-classes interview.

“I typically teach drama, usually contemporary American drama,” she said. “And I’m a big reader of contemporary drama, Irish drama in particular. I have written all kinds of little things. But they were just scraps, bits and pieces that were lying in my hard drive.”

In addition to teaching at Dawson for the past 13 years, Grant worked for several years as a general assignment reporter at the Gazette.

“Journalism was great for me, because I’ve never missed a deadline,” she said. “But if I don’t have the deadline, especially with a creative piece — I just had fragments of plays.”

It was Infinitheatre’s Write-on-Q! playwriting contest that supplied her with the cutoff date that forced her to finish Trench Patterns. Then, to her surprise, she won. This led to the current Infinitheatre production of this play about the morality of war and the personal toll taken by service in the military, directed by the company’s artistic director, Guy Sprung.

Grant holds an MA in English literature as well as a graduate diploma in journalism, from Concordia University. In her thesis, she used William Shakespeare’s Henry V, a play very much concerned with war, to “look at questions that were current in theory at the time.”

Although a slim thematic link may be detected there, Grant said her main inspiration for Trench Patterns came from two other sources: “A friend, an Irish novelist, had told me about five years ago about the First World War executions. One character in the play is a francophone Montrealer who was unjustly executed during the First World War, for desertion. There were 306 such executions. And the percentage of French Canadian and Irish was much higher. So there was something else going on, that’s the theory. There were tensions between these people and the officers in charge.”

(In fact, although were questions about loyalty to the British Crown and a fairly widespread lack of eagerness to die for the Empire in both Quebec and Ireland, the vast majority of the French and Irish enlisted did indeed serve valiantly.)

“I started digging into that (the executions),” she said, “because it seemed to be an interesting piece of little known history. It turned out that there’s a whole online movement to get these (executed) soldiers pardoned. They were often just shell-shocked 16-year-olds. I read a whole bunch of accounts of these people.”

The Canadian government added the names of 23 Canadians executed in the First World War to the Book of Remembrance on Parliament Hill in 2001. Five years later, the British Parliament granted an official pardon to all those executed during service in the British forces, or those of a Dominion.

Step 2 in Grant’s inspiration was a two-week stint, as a Gazette reporter, on a Canadian Armed Forces ship commanded by her brother, observing NATO war-game exercises. She went on board as a lefty with a pre-conceived attitude about the military and came away impressed by the intelligence and professionalism of the soldiers and officers. Still, “my brain was always asking why they were there when they could be doing anything,” she continued. “Because it’s such a foreign choice to me, even though my brother had achieved so much in that life. The women in particular were amazing to me. The female officers who had put up with so much crap to move forward within the structure.”

These two experiences fused in Grant’s mind into a play about a psychologically damaged female officer back from Afghanistan whose main companion would be her great grandfather who had been executed during the First World War. “He’s dead, but it’s not clear whether he’s a ghost or a projection (of her mind),” she said. “He becomes a main healing figure and we see her receding into his story, often, as a way of coming to terms with her own choices and story.”

Prior to the Infinitheatre production, Trench Patterns had a staged reading at a new play festival at the Artemisia Theatre in Chicago, where it was one of six chosen out of 400 entries.

This won’t be the first time that Infinitheatre has delved into military territory, just in time for Remembrance Day. Two years ago, it presented David Fennario’s Bolsheviki, about a Point-St-Charles veteran of the First World War.

Grant said it has been a thrill to watch Trench Patterns come to life on stage — as opposed to languishing in her computer hard drive for eternity.

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